Striking a Blue Flame
by reminiscent-afterthought
Summary: Kiriha would set his world alight with that eternal flame struck with his own hands...if he could.
1. accord

**A/N:** Written for

Advent Calendar 2016, bonus 2 - Alphabet Prompts Challenge  
Alphabet Prompts Challenge (each drabble has a separate prompt, in the title)  
Diversity Writing Challenge, d4 - drabble collection consisting only of 100 word drabbles  
Becoming the Tamer King Challenge, Data Forest task

* * *

 **Striking a Blue Flame**  
 _1: accord_

He'd been standing on a platform and now he'd fallen from it and realised how sullied the world underneath really was. He realised but now he was in that dirt and grime and he had to claw his own footholds into the wall and climb back up to that platform because he was on his own. Others pushed him, or didn't catch him, or just plain weren't there. Others all left him in this rubbish heap, covered in human waste and food scraps.

He'd find his way back home himself, like a stray cat that would grow into a lion.


	2. bafflement

**Striking a Blue Flame  
** _2: bafflement_

Confusion is weakness.

And this is a very good opportunity to convert that weakness into power instead.

He had something called a Xros Loader in his hands. And a digimon at his feet.

 _This is yours,_ said a voice from somewhere. _Now go and change the world._

But there's no speaker. No-one from miles around and the digimon claim to have heard nothing.

And they obey him. Listen to him like his father's people never did until they'd washed their hands of him.

When he asks them why, they point at his Xros Loader.

It's power in this new world.


	3. cremate

**Striking a Blue Flame  
** _3: cremate_

There were lots of ashes of his old life he had to burn.

The first and easiest was the way he'd cry so easily when he hurt. The Digital World was quick to deal with that. It was all fighting, after all. An all-out war and they could barely move without stumbling into a battle and he was the commander, the general, the one who gave the orders… and he had limited resources at his fingertips. He had to use them, and use them well.

He couldn't afford a weakness like tears.

He'd bury that little crybaby in his soul.


	4. dental

**Striking a Blue Flame  
** 4: dental

Getting answers proves to be harder than getting stronger…at first, anyway.

His digimon know next to nothing about the Xros Loader. He learns by trial and error at first – until he meets Amano Nene and she offers little morsels of information to him.

They're just enough to make him hungrier for more and she's a slippery eel. She only appears when she wants and he can't seem to find her otherwise.

And even when she talks, it's only to answer questions she wants so he thinks during other times, and he plots.

How can he pry those answers from her?


	5. excavation

**Striking a Blue Flame  
** _5: excavation_

He wasn't a coward. At first though, it took a bit of digging to find that courage.

Afterwards, it took a bit of digging to find that frailer person he'd been before, the weak person who'd always run to someone until there was no-one waiting there… And for a time in between he forget: forgot what it was like to be like that and forgot that even they were capable of something and that running had its own merits as well…

There was Taiki to remind him, once he started listening. And Dracomon as well…just like he'd once been.


	6. fiend

**Striking a Blue Flame  
** _6: fiend_

Sometimes he has to take on the role of the bad guy to garner a win. And sometimes, he feels bad because he remembers being on the other end of that string. But most of the time, now, he doesn't. He knows he has to step on a few toes to reach the top and his own toes still sting from resentment and they can't even say it's ignorance clouding his mind, because it's not.

He knows, and that's why sometimes he pities, and sometimes he doesn't. Still, he pushes through anyway because that's being strong… and he needs strength.


	7. gravity

**Striking a Blue Flame  
** _7: gravity_

It had seemed like far too much, far too suddenly, but in truth it had been a long time in coming. Taiki had been rapidly climbing up on his own ladder and he'd known nothing about Nene at all. And they'd hidden their true colours. Both of them. In one fell swoop they surpassed him and left him tangled and tied when all he'd been trying to do was master his own life and his own destiny.

They crashed on top of him together and he tried to struggle out from under them.

He tried… but he never managed it.


	8. happening

**Striking a Blue Flame  
** _8: happening_

He doesn't know when he loses control of everything. Maybe… He's never had any control at all and it certainly seems like that when he learns the truth about how he came into the Digital World. The freedom he's thought he had turns out to be an illusion and he can only be relieved he's escaped that net at least so it doesn't crumble at his feet…

Like Yuu. Yuu who's finding it all crumbling now, somewhere and there's no-one to hold him up and Deckerdramon is all the more valuable to him in light of that.

He'll thank him.


	9. influence

**Striking a Blue Flame  
** _9: influence_

Deckerdramon died because of him.

That turned out to be the most powerful influencer and motivator.

Because Deckerdramon had been different. He hadn't joined him for power, or courage, or the cause. He chose love, instead, and he chose him who'd thought he'd cast aside his love instead of someone like Taiki who was pouring it everywhere or like Nene who was driving it like a river flowing towards its sea.

He'd joined him for love – and he'd died for that very same love.

And by doing that, he thought him all about the love he thought he'd cast aside.


	10. javelin

**Striking a Blue Flame  
** _10: javelin_

Once he casts aside his pride instead of his love, things become clearer. Even when he takes command of all their troops, it's fine. It's not the colossal disaster the last time was. It works and it's because he's thinking more clearly and he's thinking with his heart as well as his mind.

They're humans, after all. They have hearts and they have to use them. They can't even play a game of chess otherwise and that's fine. That's who they are.

To throw away those very principles –

And it helps that his opponent this time has done exactly that.


	11. kinaesthetic

**Striking a Blue Flame  
** _11: kinaesthetic_

Taiki and the rest of Xros Heart had been saying it for days, weeks even. But it wasn't until Deckerdramon that the lesson really sunk in.

He supposed he just wasn't a book learner. Never had been. His father had tried to hammer the same lesson home as well and it hadn't stuck until that point as well.

Deckerdramon had known exactly what it would take him – and yet he'd still paid too high a price for it. Or maybe it was worth it, to him, who'd chosen that path of his own free will.

But too high for Kiriha.


	12. lenience

**Striking a Blue Flame  
** _12: lenience_

Straightening out his father's affair is no easy task, even after commanding an army in the Digital World. But he understands more now, and that understanding makes a world of difference.

He can't afford to make big differences. Not right now. But the men who betrayed them; he can deal with that, and put more trustworthy people in their place and watch from afar. He can do that because now he can look at his past with clear eyes and find those people who aren't all black with ash. And he can find the ones amongst them who can change.


	13. malady

**Striking a Blue Flame  
** _13: malady_

It was a poison that was allowed to spread.

He was sure his father had realised it. How could he not, when he worked with those people every day? His stress levels grew and his patience fell and he knew, he must have known –

But he was incapable of doing anything about that.

Later, Kiriha wondered why.

It was only after Deckerdramon that he figured it out. His father had tried to run a business the same way Kiriha had tried to run his army. And it had been far too late to change when he realised what he'd bred.


	14. namesake

**Striking a Blue Flame  
** _14: namesake_

Being the blue general was supposed to mean something powerful – but in retrospect, it becomes a bit of a joke. In fact, all their colours become a bit of a joke and they wonder if the Digital World hadn't had a perverse sense of humour in assigning them those colours.

After all, Nene is black at first and she's black because she's prepared to colour her heart and soul that colour to get Yuu back and almost succeeds in doing it, except Taiki lights a fire and burns that dark away.

As for Kiriha and blue – that's pretty obvious now.


	15. oblige

**Striking a Blue Flame  
** _15: oblige_

Running a business meant working with other people, and sometimes under them too. That wasn't exactly a glove fit for him but he had to learn, and he was learning.

And then the old Clockmaker showed up and working for him turned out to be a different thing altogether. Working as part of an invisible force scattered all around the globe to stop a new tragedy from unfolding and that was the sort of large picture he'd always had trouble with.

Or maybe he'd had trouble accepting how small a role he played.

He was just an assistant, this time.


	16. periphery

**Striking a Blue Flame  
** _16: periphery_

Kids tend to have tunnel vision. The digital world helps him in that matter, and the worldwide digital hunt helped even further. So by the time he's a legal adult and can officially take the reins of the company, he has a far greater awareness and appreciation of the world and internal politics than is expected of him.

And it's handy, because there are sleazy businessmen in every era and every company. And people who think they can take advantage of a young and inexperienced CEO – but he's a general and he knows how to look at the big picture.


	17. quicksilver

**Striking a Blue Flame  
** _17: quicksilver_

The accident was quick and painful but its effects lasted for years and years like a slow poison from some part of the debris no-one ever took away. He made the mistake of thinking it was all quick-acting, that the parts of him that need to die were dead and this was the new, stronger and independent, him.

He's just crumbling on the inside and he hadn't realised it yet.

But he would, some years later when he found the sort of friends he couldn't have found anywhere else, and the love of his family he'd lost over the years.


	18. radiance

**Striking a Blue Flame  
** _18: radiance_

He doesn't expect to ever be the sort of person other's look up to with starry eyes. He's not the starry eyed type of person.

And yet Dracomon is looking at him exactly like that. Even when he's not impressed with the other as well. When he thinks he's a weakling, when his pride is insulted because he's made to run away –

But Dracomon still looks at him with those starry eyes, as though he's some great hero.

They should look at Taiki, instead. He's the one who's come back and pushed things into motion.

Dracomon looks at Kiriha instead.


	19. specialise

**Striking a Blue Flame  
** _19: specialise_

He decided he needed to see the world some more. So he left around the same time Nene did and suddenly they were scattered all around the world because Akari's and Zenjirou's families moved as well and Taiki and Yuu were the only ones in their original houses.

And then the Hunt started, and they're in different roles because they're far away. And they'd have been left out of the loop if it hadn't been for the old Clockmaker…

But they'd had things they could do, still, even if they were far away.

Then they came back and did more.


	20. translocate

**Striking a Blue Flame  
** _20: translocate_

One moment he's in the human world and the next he's in the digital one. The transition isn't seamless: it's jarring and he has to grit his teeth and throw his hands out as though he's falling.

He's not. He's standing straight. It's the world that's tilted on its axis and given him a waking dream.

But it soon proves itself to be beyond a dream. Another reality. And it proves to be a dangerous one for the unprepared, as well.

It also proves to be good training grounds and he decides – he will use this world to grow stronger.


	21. united

**Striking a Blue Flame  
** _21: united_

He wasn't used to working in a team.

That had been one of his father's most fatal flaws but he didn't know it then.

But he had to, eventually, when Bagramon took the Code Crowl and fashioned the seven kingdoms and their seven Death Generals. Because they were all trapped in the same place, targeting the same enemy and not one of them had the power to pull it off alone no matter how they tried.

They had to work together. And eventually they built those lasting bonds and cast away the temporary.

By the final enemy, they stood united.


	22. venture

**Striking a Blue Flame  
** _22: venture_

The digital world is an unknown.

But it isn't as though he could have turned back anyway. He just goes deeper in. Because this is the training grounds he'd been given, and he has to get stronger for it.

The digital world is an unknown, so he just has to learn everything he can about it. Because information is a type of power as well – and, most important, information about its weak points.

Then he can strike hard and fast if he ever has to.

And that goes for everybody. Friends and enemies alike.

But he loses sight of strengths.


	23. waiver

**Striking a Blue Flame  
** _23: waiver_

He was too young so his right to inherit was waived – but if the guys who took over had their way, he'd never get to see a cent.

It wasn't about the money, though. It was about the principle. And his livelihood because his new guardians weren't parents at all and there was little he could do about it.

Until he learned the system, anyway. Until he learned how he could manipulate it to get more useful and understanding guardians. Not loving ones. He didn't need them. But ones he could control so they wouldn't turn their back on him.


	24. xerosis

**Striking a Blue Flame  
** _24: xerosis_

He'd wrung himself out too dry.

He realises it when he's crying for Deckerdramon. That he couldn't have gotten anywhere if people hadn't been looking out for him, if his digimon hadn't been looking out for him – even if all them had hid it under some guise or other because they'd all known he couldn't stand the thought of charity without strings attached.

He thought he had to go it alone, so he wrung himself dry.

But now he realises he's never been alone – and he can never manage alone either.

He soaks in all that love to make up.


	25. yew

**Striking a Blue Flame  
** _25: yew_

Wood was strong and tall and stubborn, but wood was also what splintered and broke or caught fire in lightning storms while the lowly reeds bent their backs and kept on going afterwards.

He knew the fables but he never quite realised he was doing the same until he broke and fell.

And he was just lucky he'd been able to put himself back together better than before.

It was because of the Code Crown, because digimon didn't permanently die: they could come back to life. They could do all the things they couldn't before, and apologise for the wrongs.


	26. zodiac

**Striking a Blue Flame  
** _26: zodiac_

They're the same age, but they're all so different: him and Taiki and Nene, and that's fine because they're different people and it's supposed to be that way. Age has very little to do with it.

Experiences count for more but they're still different there too. They spent too much time fighting apart – or just enough, to make them all the stronger in the end on the final battlefield where their efforts exponentiate.

But just because they're different, doesn't mean they can't understand each other, work together… be friends. They can: they complement each other, and cover each other's backs.


End file.
